


Eclipse

by rebelLinks



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, dewey isn’t actually dewey, moon base, so if he’s an asshole it’s because Della’s being hard on herself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 09:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15928013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelLinks/pseuds/rebelLinks
Summary: The nice thing about space, Della supposes, is that no one can hear you cry.The news broadcast had caught her a lot harder than she expected. The images flashing across her screen pulled at her heartstrings like a ship pulled into orbit, had sent her careening face-first into the planet of emotions she’d been carefully avoiding since landing on the moon.





	Eclipse

The nice thing about space, Della supposes, is that no one can hear you cry. 

The news broadcast had caught her a lot harder than she expected. The images flashing across her screen pulled at her heartstrings like a ship pulled into orbit, had sent her careening face-first into the planet of emotions she’d been carefully avoiding since landing on the moon. 

The tv had been an anchor since her crash. She had set it up in hopes that it could maybe aide her in contacting earth, and she’d been surprised to find that Duckburg’s main news outlet could be caught from up here. She didn’t intend to look the gift horse in the mouth, so to speak. It reminded her what she needed to get back home to. And both Uncle Scrooge and the city didn’t seem to age, and it became easy enough to pretend that time hadn’t passed much at all. 

But her boys. 

Her boys. 

Della shoves a fist in her beak, trying to stifle sobs. While she’s got some semblance of an oxygen setup rigged, it’s not all that strong, and she doesn’t want to push it by hyperventilating. She focuses, counts her breathes and focuses on the shadows on the wall, on the scrapes on her feet, on anything other than how big they were and how happy and -oh god she must have been up here for near a decade how had she not realized- and with shaky legs she raises herself from the corner that she’s pressed herself into and takes herself to the table near the tv. Some reporter drones about weather so far away from Della she hadn’t thought about in so long, but now…

Della Duck was a determined young woman. She was a Duck, after all, and Ducks don’t back down. So when her ship crashed into the moon, she did everything she could to keep herself level headed so that she could get home. And yes, maybe that meant pretending time wasn’t passing as fast as it was. And yes, maybe it meant talking to people who weren’t there. The moon rocks and ship wreckage hardly judged, after all. 

Sat on the table she placed herself, Della has a partially-cobbled-together circuit board. A bit of ship, with a design suspiciously similar to the Spear’s, had crashed into the moon a few days previously, and while it’s taken out the antenna she used to see home, it’s also had a few pieces from the radio in it she needed. The plan had been to fix the tv and then get to welding the bits back together, but then, well… 

Regardless, the board won’t fix itself, so Della wipes away the remaining tears with the back of her wing and gets to fixing. It’s not long, however, till she can feel a familiar prickling at the back of her neck. She bends down a little lower, not wanting to address the elephant in the space base. After a moment, the ‘elephant’ clears its throat anyways. Before he can speak though, Della simply shakes her head. “Go away.” 

“Away?” The voice questions, “Where to? Why? You’ve always liked to talk while you work.” 

“It’s different now,” Della deflects, refusing to look up from the circuit board. While she’s still sane enough, really, to know this is all in her head, she’s never had the heart to turn them away. Never wanted to until now. 

“Why? You’ve fixed circuit boards before. This isn’t exactly a challenge.” The voice pushes. And oh, Della almost wants to look at him. Wants to see how her brains interpreted him now. Instead, she picks up her soldering iron and sets to work fusing the wires together. 

“I’m not comfortable with this right now. It’s not-“ Right, her brain supplies, but she doesn’t vocalize it. Not that it matters much, as he hears it all the same, an makes a noise of confusion. “You’re…” she doesn’t know how to put this elegantly, “real.”

“Well yeah. I always was.” The voice drawls, and Della finally looks up, can’t hold herself back anymore, and-

When Della first crashed on the moon, she imagined Uncle Scrooge and Donald there along with her. It was easier to face challenges with them there besides her. However, after time began to wear on, she started imagining her children there as well. The doctors had said they were most likely all boys, n Della pictured them as such- talked to them, about the things they would do when she got home. How much she missed them. She never imagined them much older than two or so, and yet-

There, in front of her, stands Dewford- she has no way of knowing it’s him, only a gut feeling describing the ever-shifting image as him. He’s both the way she used to imagine him, and the ducklings on the tv at once, all together, in the same spot. It’s almost frightening to look at, Della thinks. “That’s not…” She stops herself, because where to start? “You’re… you’re -real-, Dewford. You’re a person, you’re alive, you have thoughts and dreams and goals and I don’t.” She has to check herself before she descends into hysterics again. “I don’t know who you are.”

“You didn’t know before, either.” Mind-Dewford points out, and she doesn’t know how to respond to it. If she’s honest she doesn’t know how to respond to any of this. It just feels wrong, to presume anything about the ducklings she’s left behind. To even imagine their voices felt like taking something she hadn’t earned, didn’t deserve. Her thoughts circle as Dewford reclines in the air, full of a disappointment Della mirrors. 

“You left us.”

The comment is just that- not a question or an accusation, just a statement, one Della can only nod mutely at. “You left us,” Mind-Dewford continues, “and ran away, and you expect to come back and everything’s gonna be better. What makes you think anyone will forgive you?”

“I don’t.” Della can only mutter numbly.

“You shouldn’t” her son scoffs, and Della feels her soul sink into the moon’s crust. “I certainly hope you’re happy. The stars are all yours though, I’d recommend you start coming to terms with the cost.”

She can only shake her head again. “It was never-“ she starts, only to bite back a sob, “I never wanted the stars.”

“Then why?” He asks, “why’d you leave us? What was the point, of the stupid rocket and the stupid mission? What’s up here that you didn’t have with us? Why didn’t you want us?”

“I was afraid!”

The cry surprises her, bubbling out of her heart and bursting through her beak. It seems to surprise Dewford too, as his questions cease. His gaze continues to pierce into the back of her neck, however, and she knows that her mind-child is prompting her to continue. “I… I was afraid. It’s silly, probably.” She can’t look up, not during this. The tears threatening to spring forth keep her eyes glued on her soldering. “Me and Donnie’s mother… your grandmother. Grandma Hortense. She died when I was so young. Younger than you are now, from the looks of it.” She wipes away the dust from her eyes, along with any renegade tears that had broken loose. “She was wonderful, I think. I don’t… time takes away a lot, you know? I don’t not-remember her, but I only have bits. The highlights, almost.” 

She can still hear her mother’s laugh, or the look she would make when she was trying to hold back her frustration. “But I realized, as I was waiting for you, that I didn’t know what a mother was supposed to be, really. I knew Uncles, and Brothers, and Grandmothers, but. There wasn’t a whole lot of example by way of mothers. And I just-” Her sentence cuts off with a stiffled cough. She should probably drink soon. She was so overly cautious about rationing out what little supplies she had, and water scared her more than anything. But she had to power on- heaven knew if she stopped speaking now she’d never be able to finish. “I realized I might be a bad mother to you. I read every book I could get my hands on but… they were so lifeless. None of them felt like real advice. And that fear just… ate me.”

“Sure I had my excuses.” The circuit board she’s welding fades in and out of focus as her eyes blur, and Della blinks back the tears. Water is not gonna help fix the radio. “Give you the stars, or whatever it was I told Scrooge. And I suppose it was true, in a sense. I wanted you to have the stars, and the moon, and the whole wide world. I just… I had convinced myself that they only way you could have those is if you didn’t have me.” A bitter laugh breaks forth. “I was blind, you know? I could tell, from the moment your eggs came, that you deserved the best mother in the world. I knew I was never gonna be that. I let that blind me to the fact that I was the only one you had.” 

The silence is deafening, which seems, Della thinks, like a silly thing to think about the moon. Of course it’s quiet, it’s space. She turns, softly, back to where mind-Dewford was floating, only to see him smiling softly, almost leaning against a wall that wasn’t there. “What?” He questions, almost laughing at her. “Did you expect me to respond?”

“Kind of,” Della admits, caught somewhere between crying and laughing. “I just kind of laid a whole lot on the table there.” 

“Yeah, sure, to no one.” Dewford straightens, before pointing towards the earth. “You want a response? Finish that radio, get down there, and tell the real me, in whatever color I’m wearing with my siblings in whatever their names are, and you’re going to give us all hugs, and then you get a response.” 

And with that, the see-saw that Della’s heart had become fell to one side, and Della throws back her head and laughs. “I suppose that’s fair enough. I’ll see you there then.” And with a nod, mind-Dewford disappears, just in time for Della to forget she was holding the soldering-iron for long enough for it to fall onto her hand.

The nice thing about space, Della supposes, is that no one could hear you swear loud enough to make your ex-Navy brother blush.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally I started writing her speaking to Huey, but I thought that having Dewey be the one would better reflect his focus during season 1. 
> 
> Anyways first DT fic yay!! First fic in a while tbh. Lemme know what you think <3


End file.
